This paper summarizes main findings from a two-step investigation of the translation of a psychological scale from English into Spanish. The overall purpose of the study was to document the effects of tailoring a scale with etic items (i.e., culturally general items) and emic items (i.e., culture specific items) on the quality of the information. Other goals were to document the psychometric properties of self-efficacy scores for a sample of Spanish-speaking students from southern Mexico and to appraise the effects of extreme response style on total, factor, and item congruence. The short form of the Career Decision Making Self-Efficacy Scale (CDMSE-SF) (Betz, Klein, and Taylor, 1996) was tailored and administered to 3,000 high school students. Reliability and validity evidence was gathered using standard psychometric practices. For the second part of the study, the scale was administered to two samples of students differing in their extreme response styles. Total, factor, and item congruence coefficients were gathered from Procrustes rotation. Reliability and validity evidence did not support the five-dimension structure of the self-efficacy construct. Reliability estimates for the translation were markedly inferior to those reported for the source language, and dimensions present in the source culture were not reproducible in the target culture. Students could not distinguish between items dealing with self-appraisal and items dealing with goal selection. The second part of the study corroborated these findings. Nonuniform effects of the extreme response style were found on etic and emic items. The observed no invariance might relate more to extreme response styles than self-efficacy. (Contains 8 tables and 34 references.) (Author/SLD)

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